Online smear campaign against outspoken Chinese author highlights Beijing’s growing attempts to influence discussion on Twitter
The articles attacking Mr Xuecun have been retweeted by more than 800 different Twitter accounts Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
By , Shanghai7:34AM BST 08 Sep 2014
An online smear campaign against one of China’s most celebrated young authors has fuelled suspicions that Beijing is opening a new front in its propaganda war, this time on Twitter.
The Communist Party has expended huge resources on monitoring and gaining control of Chinese social media services including Weibo, the Twitter-like microblog, and WeChat, an increasingly popular social networking service.
In recent months that push appears to have extended to Twitter, with some experts speculating that Chinese propaganda chiefs are now more actively experimenting with ways of manipulating the debate on the American social media network.
In July the campaigning group Free Tibet accused Beijing of “the systematic use and abuse of Twitter” after discovering dozens of fake Twitter accounts that had been spreading government propaganda about Tibet.
The accounts used stolen profiles and photographs – including one of Syd Barrett, the late Pink Floyd vocalist – to pump out pro-government messages.
Free Tibet said Beijing was guilty of “cynical deception designed to manipulate public opinion”.
Now, claims have emerged that dozens of mysterious Twitter accounts have been circulating lengthy and detailed articles attacking Murong Xuecun, an acclaimed Chinese writer. Murong, whose real name is Hao Qun, has incurred Beijing’s anger by criticising it over issues including censorship, the Tiananmen Square massacre and religious freedom.
The articles attacking Murong have been retweeted by more than 800 different Twitter accounts, many of them recently created, according to an analysis by Xiang Xiaokai, a Chinese blogger.
Mr Xiang said he believed many of those accounts were “robots” that had been set up for the sole purpose of automatically distributing propaganda discrediting a prominent Communist Party foe.
He suspected that the campaign was part of “an attempt to make Chinese-language Twitter more like Weibo” by trying to manipulate the debate.
